Mrinal Pande - What the lives of the five virgins of the Ramayan and Mahabharat can teach us
Early every morning,
millions of Indians may remember hearing family elders chanting the names of
the panch kanyas or five virgins – Ahilya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara and Mandodari
– from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. Hindus believe that uttering the
names of these five women every day can destroy the greatest of sins.
I always wondered why
some obvious names like Sita and Savitri and Arundhati were missing in this
list of pure women? Also, how could married women be called kanyas or virgins?
Finally, weren’t all of these women traumatised by unsolicited sexual abuse, or
stigmatised by being wives of serial abusers of other women? Is there an unseen
clue hidden behind invoking their names each morning? What are the stories the
names carry with them?
It was the great
Sanskrit scholar Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade’s brilliant unfinished treatise
on marriage in ancient India, based on the Mahabharata, which gave me some
answers. Today, in common parlance, the word kanya means a young virgin. But in
the Mahabharata, as the sun god visiting young princess Kunti explains to her,
the root of the word kanya is kam or to desire.
Thus a kanya is a
young woman who has the right to claim whosoever is the subject of her desire.
Our panch kanyas, therefore, are five extraordinarily honest, spunky women, who
stood up for their right to justify their desires. When the need arose, these
women meted out the harshest punishments to predatory men – who used wile or
claims of familiarity to sexually abuse women and then expected them to stay
silent and disappear.
Two poets Valmiki and
Ved Vyas introduce us to this extraordinary band of women by recording their
remarkable stories. Both the poets exonerated the women of the charges made
against them by their divine and/or regal male abusers. Poets alone have the
gaze that can plumb the depths of history and introduce the world to the
inconsolable hearts of birds and humans. Valmiki and Ved Vyas knew what it was
to be reviled for being illegitimate. They were poets living on the edge of
society who were honest record-keepers of human history and wars. Valmiki, the
writer of the Ramayana, was a dacoit-turned-saint who gave shelter to a
pregnant Sita exiled by her maryada purushottam (ideal man) husband, Ram, after
tongues began wagging in Ayodhya about Sita’s chastity following her rescue
from the clutches of Ravana. Ved Vyas was the ugly illegitimate son of queen
Satyavati (the great-grandmother of the Pandavas and Kauravas), who chose to
live in exile upon a tiny island, while a fratricidal war between deemed
legitimate brothers decimated a whole age as narrated in the Mahabharata.
Ahilya
She appears in the
Ramayana as the plain-looking pious wife to the sage Gautama. The trickster god
Indra, impersonated Gautama and abused her sexually while her husband was out
for his morning ablutions. When the sage returned and saw them together, he
cursed both Indra and Ahilya, who turned into a stone. Much later, when Rama
was travelling through the forest, he stubbed his toe on the large boulder that
was Ahilya and his touch broke the spell. As Ahilya stood before him, moved by
her obvious grace and purity, Rama touched her feet and asked his brother to do
likewise. “Such grace must be revered and bowed to”, he said.
Draupadi
She was born out of
the fire of revenge that consumed her father Drupad. Her hand was won by Arjuna
in a Swayamvara through a tightly contested competition of archery. But after
an absent-minded mother-in-law asked the brothers to share Arjuna’s prize, she
was forced to be wife to all five Pandava brothers. Then the oldest brother,
Yudhisthir, lost her (and everything else) in a game of dice and the winners,
his cousins the Kauravas, dragged her by the hair calling her a whore who slept
with multiple partners. Draupadi then vowed gory revenge on her tormentors. “O
Krishna,” she told her dearest friend and confidant, “these men are now nothing
to me!”
“You lost our riches
as a lazy cowherd loses his cows in a jungle,” she screamed to her husbands.
“Fie upon such cowardice disguised as principle.”
According to
Villiputthur Alavar’s Tamil version of the Mahabharata, several centuries
later, this fiery woman, as Draupadi Amman, became a goddess of revenge all
over north Arkot in Tamil Nadu. She also gained two local guardians – Pottu
Raja and Muttal Ravuttan – one a Hindu, another a Muslim. Pottu Raja was
minister to the king of Koshambi and managed to save his lord’s kingdom only
with Draupadi Amman’s help while the king was away on a pilgrimage. Statues of
Pottu Raja holding an enemy’s head dripping blood still guard gates to all Draupadi
Amman’s temples, reminding visitors of how she did not tie her hair until she
had washed it with the blood of those who had tormented her. Here, Draupadi is
female memory pitted against the abusive authority of the male state and a weak
jurisprudence.
Kunti
Kunti’s story turns
the male-created myths about legitimacy and heirs upon itself. As the five
Pandavas – Yudhisthir, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakul and Sahdeva – sired by various gods
claimed the throne of Hastinapur as theirs by the law of the land and killed and
maimed the sons of a blind king who, being physically disabled, was deemed
unfit to be king, the idea of a fratricidal Mahabharata war begins to look like
a sick joke. As a young girl, Kunti was granted the powers to summon whoever
she wished as her companion. She summoned the Sun God and became his bride for
the night. She conceived but was forced to abandon her firstborn, as she was an
unwed mother. Ironically, after her marriage to Pandu, her ailing and impotent
husband, he begged her to use her boon discreetly to impregnate herself and her
co-wife Madri, in order to provide the kingdom with heirs. Thus the five
Pandavas were born. Misfortune thereafter followed Kunti like a shadow. She
wandered incognito with her exiled sons, unable to publicly acknowledge the
great archer Karna as hers. She tried to get even with the system in the only
way open to widows like her – by upholding the myth of patriarchy and
instilling in her sons the claim that they alone had the legitimate right to
the throne of Hastinapur. The rest, as they say, is history.
Mandodari
The beautiful wife of
King Ravana of Lanka, Mandodari, whose name literally means “she of the slender
waist”, was the daughter of the great architect Maya, the Asura. She was given
in marriage to Ravana while she was still very young. Maya, like many fathers
of girls, had wailed that being father to a nubile daughter was a burden on any
honourable man. Like all girls forced to grow up fast, Mandodari was a quick
learner. She was both sharp and forthright in asking her errant husband to send
the abducted Sita back immediately. “Sita seet nisa sum (Sita is here to haunt
us like a long dark winter night),” she said. When she saw that her husband was
unmoved, she prophesied that his abduction and degradation of another man’s
wife with lustful intentions would end in his death. She told her husband that
tears of good women did not fall to be absorbed and forgotten, they always
brought nasty results... Read more:
http://scroll.in/article/805344/what-the-lives-of-the-five-virgins-of-the-ramayan-and-mahabharat-can-teach-us